Keeping up a long tradition: Pewsey’s saddlers continue to serve the local ‘horse industry’
Gary Gilroy (left) & Graham Spackman & saddleryTucked away on Pewsey’s Fordbrook Business Centre is the Marlborough area’s G&S Saddlery. In two rooms of what is known as The Old Bungalow, Gary Gilroy and Graham Spackman provide essential services for many parts of the local ‘horse industry’.
They do not make saddles, but they do repair them – a lot of them. They repair all manner of leather tack, harness and other leather goods and they sell a wide range of equine foods and goods – and they sell on saddles for people who no longer need them or who get a better saddle or a better horse that needs a different saddle.
They also provide a service that is especially valuable in winter’s cold and mud – they collect horse blankets, some of which will need repair, and send them off to be cleaned in Bristol.
Gary and Graham were both apprenticed to Chandlers the family business which provided saddlery skills and stores for two centuries of Marlborough’s racing trainers, commercial hire horses, waggoners, farm horses, coaches and family nags. David Chandler who retired in 1997, still lives in the town with his wife.
Graham and his traditional hand toolsGraham began his four year apprenticeship with Chandlers is 1968 and Gary began his in 1974. They still do almost all the work by hand and use traditional and well-tried hand tools to cut and shape and stitch leather.
Almost all saddles used in Britain – whether normal saddles or racing plates – are made in Walsall. At its peak Walsall’s saddle makers employed about 10,000 people and there are still more than 40 makers of saddles in and around the town. Little wonder the Walsall Football Club (now in League One – the third tier of the English football league system) is still known as ‘The Saddlers’.
But once made and used day in and day out, saddles get nibbled by horses, caught on gates and simply worn out by use. Then they come to G&S Saddlery for their expert repair work.
Gary and Graham set up their partnership in 2000. They worked first at Maizey Farm, then in the old Marlborough Building Supplies yard off the London Road and moved to their Pewsey base “four years come the spring”.
Each week they travel around visiting the training yards of Richard Hannon, Roger Charlton, Alan King, Andrew Balding and others to collect items for repair and check that saddlery and tack are fit for purpose. And they visit horse owners around the area to fit saddles whether for a first pony or a million pound thoroughbred – though some horse owners think that one saddle fits all.
Chandlers in the High Street
Chandlers in London Road A while ago they took on apprentice and paid the costs of his materials for his release sessions at college in Salisbury. But it did not work out: “He thought he’d pick it all up just like that.” Sometimes he worked hard and concentrated on the job in hand, but mostly is was as if “we owed him a favour.”
The saddlery trade has existed on apprenticeships and family knowledge. When David Chandler joined his father Jesse in the business in 1962 he was the seventh generation to be a saddler. The firm used to have premises in the High Street (now the White Horse Bookshop beside which there is still ‘Chandlers Yard’), and then moved to Nos. 8 and 9 London Road, which they had bought from the Marquis of Ailesbury.
They had moved to Hilliers Yard by the time they finally sold the business in 1992. David and his wife Jo worked on for the new owners. As he writes in his book Chandlers: Saddlers of Marlborough - a memoir : “We just made two hundred years as saddlers in Marlborough with [a] rug for the winner of the 1996 Members Race at the Tedworth Point-to-Point” which celebrated the 1796-1996 anniversary of F.J.Chandler.
Traditional hand tool for sizing leather strapsAnd in Pewsey, using the skills they learnt during their apprenticeship, Gary and Graham continue to provide an essential and local service for the ‘horse industry’ in the Marlborough area and stretching north and east across downs – the ‘industry’ is a quiet, unobtrusive economic force that values the old skills of the saddlers.
The not very excitable Victorian poet Robert Browning summed horse riding up in six much quoted words and an exclamation mark: “Boots, saddle, to horse, and away!”
Boots come and go with fashions in shapes and colours, horses mostly go where you want them to – it is the saddle that is the much sat on essential. Unless you are into bareback circus stunts, you can get nowhere without a well maintained saddle and its leathers and girth.